escapade: n. a piece of daring or reckless behaviour. How many times have you been labelled as mad or reckless because you homeschool?
Well I say its time to break down those notions - Bring on the Madness !

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Friday, 21 August 2015

One of my favourite aspects of Montessori is the emphasis on practical life. Seeing children gain the confidence to do for themselves really makes me happy.I've been wondering how to include more practical life into lessons for the older girls (they've kind of outgrown pouring, lacing and pegging) when I realised I just needed to get them doing practical things they loved (I'm sure chores count but they don't love those).I stuck on the idea of making frames for their honey bees,

they plan to sell extra queens and honey so will need as many hives and brood boxes as possible and the carpentry skills they develop will work nicely alongside having to design labels and a web page to sell their honey and spare bees from.

So I get entrepreneurship, art and design, carpentry, web design and math lessons all in one hobby : )

Monday, 17 August 2015

A big hole we were digging for foundations revealed clay in our garden.clay = happy kidsneedless to say they got very muddy digging up loads of clay, then spent a few hours washing it and making clay fruit and bowls.

Sunday, 9 August 2015

I don't know about you but we try to keep some form of education going over the summer - not as formal or structured as normal but we do look for opportunities to learn. Art and drawing skills seem to be worked on more.

It's always the perfect time for history projects that we always meant to do but never got around to,

This was created by Susan Kilbride, a homeschooling mum with a degree in biology. When teaching her son, she noticed a lack of fun science activities for kids and decided to created this resource so that its super easy to teach kids science in a fun and engaging way - she also designed it so you don't have to spend loads of time doing the research to teach science.

Science Unit Studies For Homeschoolers and Teachers is a large paperback book of approximately 200 pages in length. It's split into 20 unit studies, the first ten units are designed for younger children and the second half is geared towards 8+. The younger units include stories, songs, games and fun hands-on activities like making a model of the chest cavity, musical bottles, taste testing etc. whilst the activities for the older group are more in depth and include writing reports, using a microscope, comparing mixtures and solutions, splitting light etc.

Each unit study starts with a list of materials needed for that topic - most are common household items, so there is no expensive materials costs.

Then it's broken into subtopics for the unit. For instance, we started with Chapter 17: Forces and Motion (just because that is what we were studying when the book arrived). This unit is broken down into:

Part 1: Force and FrictionPart 2: GravityPart 3: Newton's First Law of MotionPart 4: Newton's Second Law of MotionPart 5: Newton's Third Law of MotionPart 6: Centripetal ForcePart 7: Magnetic ForceTest for Force and Motion

Each parts has diagrams, teaching information and the fun, hands-on activities that cement the concepts in their minds. There is often a number of activities for each part and sometimes they are placed in sequential order where they build on the knowledge of the previous activity in the unit. A good example for this was in the activities for Centripetal force where the second activity (excuse the funny face - she didn't like the water flying out at her)

builds on the knowledge gained from the first.

These unit studies have been lots of fun - we've used it as a group lesson for all of my girls (6, 8, 10 & 12) and while some of the younger lessons were easy for my older two, they still enjoyed them (especially as there was no end of unit test). I liked how easy it was to pull the activities together (it takes mere minutes - especially if I collect the materials from the list before hand) and how little time it took me to "prepare" a memorable science lesson using this. We spent about two weeks completing each unit but you could stretch them out over a longer period or move through them faster depending on your kids. This book is packed full of hands-on activities and experiments that could easily keep my girls busy all year.It's really nice to see them requesting these 'lessons' even though its officially their summer holidays and their workload was only supposed to be math and reading. Lilly said 'they were the best science shes done in ages', while Sunflower has kidnapped the book (I found it under her pillow) so she could look for activities she wanted to do this week : )

I loved how versatile this book was, you couldn either work through the units in order or pick and choose single units or even single activities. It can stand as a complete science curriculum or it can provide one off activities to keep kids entertained - I think this would also be perfect for our homeschool group days and can see myself using lots of these activities for our group.

I would say that if you are looking for fun ideas to teaching science, then this book is for you - you can even check out their two free unit studies you can download to see how they work for your family.

Science Unit Studies for Homeschoolers and Teachers is available for $16.95 and is aimed at children aged 4-13 years.